Slashdot videos: Now with more Slashdot!

View

Discuss

Share

We've improved Slashdot's video section; now you can view our video interviews, product close-ups and site visits with all the usual Slashdot options to comment, share, etc. No more walled garden! It's a work in progress -- we hope you'll check it out (Learn more about the recent updates).

New submitter geekoid writes "According to media reports about leaked Windows 8.1 code, the next incarnation of Microsoft's flagship operating system will have an option to boot directly to the desktop. People have discovered 'references to a "CanSuppressStartScreen" option in early builds of the Windows 8.1 registry.' There is also speculation that Microsoft will be re-implementing the Start button, though the claims come from nebulous 'sources,' rather than the leaked code. In light of recent reporting about the general distaste and design flaws of Windows 8's user interface, will Microsoft's updates be dynamic enough to stop the current Windows exodus?"

The real problem is that the innovator who really stole all their ideas from other people, has failed to realize that their own User Interface has become a mature technology, as familiar to most people as "gas on the right, brake on the left" in a car.

If they were then, at the typical international airport, you'd notice the large ring of car wrecks around the rental garage. Moving the steering wheel is a helpful hint to remind you to drive on the other side of the road. Swapping the brake and accelerator pedals would be a recipe for unpleasantness.

Moving the steering wheel also helps you to actually be able to see to overtake safely when driving on the correct side of the road. And gear shifter/gearbox is in the middle of the car. Hand-brake can vary.

The real problem is that the innovator who really stole all their ideas from other people, has failed to realize that their own User Interface has become a mature technology, as familiar to most people as "gas on the right, brake on the left" in a car.

Haven't thought about that, but you're right. And when you change gas and brake controls to gestures on the glass, you see a lot of people frantically cleaning their windshield as they head towards the cliff. "Not dome light! Brake! Brake!!!"

The real problem is that the innovator who really stole all their ideas from other people, has failed to realize that their own User Interface has become a mature technology, as familiar to most people as "gas on the right, brake on the left" in a car.

That's just because you're too primitive and non-fashionable enough to realize the true beauty and wonder* of putting the gas above your head and splitting the brake into three pedals, a button, two switches, and voice control. Oh, and Facebook integration.

I agree - and really their greatest folly with Windows 8 adoption was with trying to create a single UI for all platforms. That just doesn't make sense from a user standpoint at all. Phones are going to have different UI needs than tablets. Tablets are going to have different UI needs than PCs. Each specific family of hardware needs a UI created for use on that particular hardware type, due to each hardware type having it's own nuances in user input. I don't know why their designers thought otherwise.

With Balmer in charge, the answer is really "developers developers developers". They imagined "write once run anywhere(that's a MS device)" would appeal to UI developers. The reality is that devs don't want to write code for a platform that users don't want to use, and the "old" windows paradigms were more natural to code for in addition to having legacy support.

I think Ballmer and MS knows that different hardware require different UI. I think MS wanted to foist their tablet/smartphone UI on desktop users to get them used to it so if/when they bought a tablet/smartphone they were already family with Metro. Basically they couldn't compete on the merits of the UI alone so they had to leverage their monopoly.

They're on the right track, but their implementation is still too blurry. Right at the first boot (or during the installation) of Windows 8 the question should be asked before the user can do anything else: "Do you want to use this as a desktop or as a tablet?"

Choose "Desktop" and you are presented with the same familiar UI you would expect in Windows, and no full-screen Metro. If you want to use the built-in Metro apps, launch them from the Start menu they just appear in their own self-contained, manageable windows.

Choose "Tablet" and it'll default to its current behavior, with the full-screen touch-friendly interface and Desktop mode accessible as its own tile.

Stick an option in the control panel where people can change this setting if needed later on down the road. One OS to develop, both usage cases covered.

sI DO! IDO! (waves hand!).... Its because they're idiots.. I am the neighborhood tech support guy (probably cuz I'm retired and around the house most of the time), and since Windows 8 was shoved down everybodys throat, I hardly go a week without somebody in the neighborhood asking me "how do I get *something* besides this new Windows?"... There have been several neighbors who didn't ask me before going to WorstBuy or Frys and buying a new laptop and then finding it came with Microsoft's latest steaming tu

No the real problem is that there isn't a real problem. Yes, 8 was another Vista/Me experience but writers and commentators keep tying this back to the "global PC market collapse" which may or may not be due to Windows 8 as the story guys. The subby wasn't much better with his "exodus" comment, the simple fact is Windows 8 isn't bad by any means from a UI stand point if, ya know, you actually use it. It's start up time and performance on computers is at least on par with 7 and to me feels a little more spry. The real issue is that PC hardware has been good enough for years, my 07/08 Dell laptop died a couple weeks ago, and surprise surpise I'm on an 07 Vaio to tide me over until I purchase and guess what? It works for everything but games and Adobe Lightroom (which is still 'passable'). Keeping that in mind this 'collapse' may very well be happening as far as new PC sales go, but it has no merit when it comes to PC usage. Show me a person that has truly gone mobile and left the PC behind and I'll show you someone desperate for clicks. No all that is happening is that people are buying other devices while their PC keeps on plugging along year after year and the sheer amount of hyperbole and linkbaiting surrounding this issue is absolutely ridiculous.

The real problem is that the innovator who really stole all their ideas from other people, has failed to realize that their own User Interface has become a mature technology.

However, its worth remembering that Microsoft are not the only ones to jump on the tabletization bandwagon whether their users like it or not.

Gnome 3, Ubuntu Unity have had similar castigation for their new 'post PC' interfaces. However, what with Linux being open source and not having the GUI joined at the hip to the rest of the OS this is less of a problem for Linux users.

Apple have also received flak for the fairly limited tabletization that they've done with OS X.

Problem is, we're in a tablet bubble, coming at a time when everybody who wants a regular PC already has one and PC specs are no longer rising fast enough to make them obsolete after 18 months. I like tablets, think they raise some interesting new possibilities and are great for some uses - but the current attitude is "the solution is mobile technology - now, what was the problem again?".

I'll just jump in here because the entire thread is now talking about God damned cars, if that was your intent congrats as it worked.

As for Windows NINE, or Blue, calling it "8.1" when we haven't seen how much they did to the guts would be like calling Vista "XP.1" when they had radically changed everything (for the better I might add, even though Vista sucked getting rid of "run as admin" by default had to be done and the idiot that did that with XP, most likely so win9X games could run easier, should have been fired) would be stupid so lets hold off judging whether its a point 1 or another radical shift until we see the thing.

But if they don't bring back the start menu and traditional desktop? I predict MSFT will be EOL before Win 7 is EOL in 2020 and I honestly never thought I'd be able to say that. I mean look at the facts, we have Alienware selling an Ubuntu based gaming rig, you have Chromebooks on the main pages of Tiger and many other web sellers...this is unprecedented folks, it really is. Not even 5 years ago trying to sell a PC without Windows was the kiss of death. Sure dell had a few but they were on the back page and you had warnings like you were walking into the adult section of a video store, now all these companies are openly advertising non windows systems? We haven't seen that since IBM killed OS/2 more than 20 years ago.

But despite what the morons at places like Motley Fool say the PC is NOT dying, its NOT going away, heck PC gaming alone made more than 20 billion dollars last year and PCs still sell hundreds of millions of systems yearly. The entire premises is because PCs don't sell like they used to then its "ZOMFG they are dying, everybody is just buying iPads ZOMFG!" when in reality its just PCs are now INSANELY overpowered for what people have to do. I built a new PC every year from 94-07...why? Because I really didn't have much of a choice, with single core speeds jumping so fast you really couldn't upgrade and a 2 year old PC would be struggling to run the latest software. in one 5 year period I went from a 400MHz to a 2200MHz, that is 5 times the speed in 5 years, it was just nuts. Now that the MHz war is over they switched to cores and quickly ended up with systems much MUCH faster than anybody but a rare few percent can actually max out. Now my nearly 4 year old PC has 6 cores, 8GB of RAM, and 3TB worth of space...why would I build a new one when nothing is maxing out what I got?

So somebody at MSFT had BETTER grow a damned brain, X86 is still a billion dollar business and is here to stay, it will simply move from the insane "OMG I have to throw my 2 year old PC away because its too slow!" to a more sane 5-7 year cycle but that is still hundreds of millions of units every year. if MSFT wants to be Apple that is fine, I don't think it will happen but whatever, but you don't shit all over your existing markets because you want to get into a new market. Look we ALL know what the start screen and TIFKAM was, it was somebody at MSFT that had heard of the EEE strategy but didn't know how to actually do it trying to use the desktop to EEE their way into mobile and of course it flopped, anybody with a drop of common sense saw that it was sticking handlebars on a pickup, tablets and desktops just don't work anything alike and trying to shoehorn a mobile OS onto the desktop was just as dumb as the itty bitty start screen they used on WinCE. But with so many selling OSes other than Windows MSFT better wake the fuck up because we know what that is, that is the OEMs looking at exit strategies. If MSFT doesn't make a desktop people want somebody is gonna take that market and with their shitty numbers they can't afford to just abandon the X86 market.

Windows predates Linux. The actual 'theft' would be from Xerox PARC, Apple and others who predate Windows.

But the ideas aren't stolen. They were freely available for everyone to use because they were developed before we reached the level of intellectual property idiocy that allows rounded corners and other moronically simple design elements to be patented and copyrighted.

Windows 3.x was certainly more than an 'application' running on top of DOS. Windows did its own disk I/O on i386 hardware, its own memory management, its own task scheduling, its own video etc. It did what an OS does and shared that hardware and furnished higher level SYS and API calls to applications. DOS was hardly more than a boot loader for Windows 3.x It just happens that windows preserved the environment and allowed you to return to it.

Its a bit of matter of semantics and what definitions of things you like to use; but Windows 3 was not just an 'Application' in the modern user of the term, nor was it quite an OS.

Me thinks you should go read the definition of Operating System [wikipedia.org] and compare that to what Windows 3.x was. Windows required a Disk Operating system in order to run because it lacked very important aspects of an Operating system. Low level drivers could not be loaded in Windows, like Disk I/O and Network devices (hell even Keyboard and Mouse was loaded by DOS). Windows was an easier way to launch applications, sure, but a launcher is not an operating system.

windows did not steal from Apple - Apple and Microsoft both stole from Xerox and implemented them poorly...

IIRC:

Xerox licensed all GUI concepts to Apple for commercialization in a perfectly normal licensing deal in exchange for Apple stock.

Microsoft took Apple's variations on those concepts and created Windows, Apple sued because there was no licensing deal in place, Microsoft found a loophole in a code-sharing development contract that meant Apple had given Microsoft a license to the GUI code by accident.

Apple has chosen to migrate to an all iOS world slowly, subtly. Give them time, it's in the grand plan. The walled garden with all of it's ways of providing a continuing revenue stream after the initial purchase will eventually be the way of all Apple systems.

MS on the other hand kinda of has to cut the cord and make the jump in one move or forever get stuck in limbo as people refuse to let go of the old ways. It will cause a lot more gnashing of teeth initially, but I suspect by the time Win 9 or 10 (or

MS already had success with this method. Back in the XP days, MS needed to drag developers into modern days using a decent security model, which required a rewrite of drivers. So, Vista came out which resulted in vendors writing alpha quality code, and blaming the breaks on MS's new OS.

By the time Windows 7 got out the door, third parties finally got the concept of not having admin rights for every single executable, so it was painless.

Windows 9 is when people will say that MS has it "right"... and the cycle will begin anew.

Apple has chosen to migrate to an all iOS world slowly, subtly. Give them time, it's in the grand plan.

They have a Mac App Store but no one is required to use it,

...Yet

It aint gonna happen. The Mac App Store is fine for small and/or "not well known" vendors. However for the "big guys" who have the resource to have their own stores and digital download infrastructure the Mac App Store has little advantage, certainly nothing worth losing a 30% cut. These big well known vendors don't need to be discovered via the Mac App Store's listings and search capabilities, their potential customers know off the vendor and their products. Not letting these vendors sell direct will just cause them to drop the Mac OS X platform. Good bye Blizzard games, Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, etc. It aint gonna happen.

It was in the prelim releases. They removed it.
They did it for one reason, get people used to the new UI and they will be comfortable picking up a win 8 tablet.
The entire thing was an attempt to strong arm the consumer into getting used to something. There was no reason to remove the start button, BUT THEY REMOVED IT.

There's a reason clutch pedals are disappearing from race cars. Robo-shifters are the way of the future. As fun as it may be to operate a UI that's some combination of rowing machine and stationary bike, most people don't want to pedal their cars to work, and with robo-shifters you keep the efficiency and performance that you would lose with a slushbox.

At this date I only send documents that are.docx or.xlsx MS OpenXML. Good luck with that and hope you are not sending out resumes with that format. A hint. that table that looks fine will look like crap and be misformatted in my Word 2010 viewer. I will throw it out and go to another candidate.

I use edlin and 7-bit ascii graphics characters to edit my resumes you insensitive clod...requires a dos emulator to run the bat file that cats the text - if running on a modern system, you have to load up at least 256 copies of moslowfor it not to scroll by at light-speed.

...wow... I'd forgotten I'd even known that. I remember moslow. Used it on old Wing Commander games when the hardware got too fast.

But seriously, I still use VI daily, and it's four years older than edlin. So if you want me offa your lawn, you have to do better than that.:-)

And somewhere online I still have my original IT professional resume, in.fm format. Those were the days... Mind you, not *good* days, but days...

Ok, so telephone activation it is. The first guy claimed ignorance and told me his computer was down so he couldn't look up a code, and to try again in a bit in case the server is over loaded.Sure, OK. An hour later, same results.This time the phone

I think what is meant by "exodus" in this context is failure to jump on the next version as soon as its available. I think "continued exodus" might mean that of the last six major releases, at least three have been overlooked in significant numbers. That's a lot of money that Microsoft did not receive. (What's wrong with you people??)

From an enterprise viewpoint this looks very different. Right now I am in the middle of our Windows XP to Windows 7 migration. We skipped Vista entirely - when users asked for it, we told them "we don't have the time".

Same thing all over again. It's great that your aunt has a new smartphone that does everything, and she thinks that's the wave of the future. But I have legacy code, ODBC connections, custom written drivers, and automated patching to worry about. Not to even mention bare metal imaging, inventory agents, or the thousands of lines of old batch files that glue things together. About 90% of the enterprise IT guys have told Microsoft "we'll wait for the next bus". What they're doing right now is putting together the next bus. I'm certainly in no hurry, it will be 2014 before we even think of how we're going to implement Win8.

I can cruise on Win7 until 2017. Microsoft is still getting our software assurance money if we upgrade or stay with WinXP. No one's in any hurry right now.

This is not strictly true. The reason for keeping it around is that people like me get to leave at 5pm and do things besides messing with computers.

When we get a new PC in, it takes all of 20 minutes for us to load on a custom image with our network specific settings. Maybe another 15 minutes for Office, Adobe Pro, antivirus, and all the utilities that are installed by default. Applications like Photoshop or AutoCAD might take 10 minutes each. All this is fully automated, an 8th grader would be able to do it once we showed them how the management tools work. And it's over a 1G Ethernet link, so it's fast.

Contrast that to when we get a new iPad in. No PXE booting, no easy configuration through the network. No management tools that are worth a tin shit. I have to physically enter all that information in. Can't even swap in a replicated hard drive since it can't be taken apart. Loading from a USB stick? Hahah... No we have to go through the "cloud" for everything.

This isn't inertia. This is "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". I do this for a living and have to stay late when things change. Chasing the new shiny from Apple isn't as important to me as getting home in time to get a motorcycle ride in. When the CIO asks me about Windows 8, I just say "let's wait for a start button".

In a way you made my point. There was a time when a PC was the "new shiny". There was a long period of time during PC history when there was no PXE booting and WDS, no AD, no GP, no easy configuration through the network or management tools. But yet it caught on and eventually became what it is now. I look at the large cycle of history of the PC and I see how it replaced the "restrictive" old client-server paradigm in favor of all that local power and freedom on your desktop, only to be retrofitted over the years to go right back where it began with the restricted and confined client-server paradigm. And now we're seeing it start over again with the whole BYOD movement.

I'm in the same boat as you, and currently figuring out how to get our XP dependent ERP stack up to Win 7. Fortunately I have a similar setup, still not as nice as an apt package manager would be, but for Windows I'd never expected this level of automation.

However with the whole BYoD crap I, and I'm sure you too, get pestered about all the time, I thought I'd share what made my life easier dealing with iPhones and iPads.To be honest, I haven't seen this level of configuration since blackberry.

An interesting "full circle" given the history of the PC that the main reason given now for keeping it around is that is corporate inertia.

Exactly, take a look at the software that made companies buy IBM PCs in the first place. These were spread sheets, word processors, databases, financial programs and such. Those needs may seem mundane today but they are not magically going away, and they are just as critical to businesses as they were then. And those are not the sort of things you can easily do on a toy phone or tablet.

The problem is that Microsoft didn't bet their company on their attempts to force a paradigm shift in how people interact with and use Windows. They bet the entire desktop computer industry along with them. By way of point on how bad things are Windows Vista wasn't released at Christmas like Windows 8 was and Windows Vista saw much higher deployment rates (not sales rates) than Windows 8 has for the same months after release. The net result was an almost epic level collapse of the industry that followed with a record drop in PC sales, however all of the offered excuses fall flat when you look at them with a touch of logic:

The economy. It's actually better now than it has been for the last several years and unemployment has been starting to decrease.Tablets. Tablets started becoming popular a few years ago, the slump in PC sales is directly timed with the release of Windows 8.People already having a computer. Since the Mhz wars petered out a several years back speed has had a little to do with new computer sales. Again, nothing new here.Smart Phones. Smart Phones started taking off en mass about 3-4 years ago and there is nothing particularly expansive related to the last 6 months there.

The bottom line is that Microsoft started causing severe economic damage to the PC industry with their attempt to force a UI change on the market. If they hurt the industry enough, the industry while feel compelled to look for alternatives to Microsoft to distribute their products. Microsoft knows that this can and has happened with smart phones and tablets and industry simply couldn't take any more pain without risk of simply no longer being dependent on Microsoft.

The secondary reason is that the enterprise market has made adamantly clear that they absolutely will not deploy Windows 8 until the start button and boot to desktop interface issues are resolved. Microsoft saw enterprises stick it to them with XP for a decade and realizes that enterprise is not about to put up with another Vista experience. Microsoft has to make these changes, or they risk losing their distribution chain to their competition.

The economy. It's actually better now than it has been for the last several years and unemployment has been starting to decrease.

- a random wrong thing in the mix.

Unemployment only 'decreased' because half a million of people who were on unemployment moved off of it to other things, like disability and welfare, basically gave up searching for work. Economy is worse than it was even a few years back, you may be confusing the economy with irrelevant asset price indicators in the stock market. The economy (as in money management of the entire system) is more in impossible to pay debt, ever growing inflation and government mode. That's not a good thing at all.

In the last 6 months I've bought 2 computers, a desktop and a laptop. And both times I went well out of my way to avoid Win8.

Now I consider myself at least slightly more computer savvy than the average individual, and when I went to Best Buy to play around with Windows 8 (since I'd heard it was different) the 20 minute trial I gave it was VERY FRUSTRATING. I managed to figure things out a bit, and I had no doubt with some time and internet searching I could figure the rest out, but I had no desire to!!

I didn't want to spend time figuring it out! It just pissed me off. I needed a desktop very urgently, and was planning on buying a new computer and buying a copy of Win7 online and just wiping off Win8.

I got lucky because the guy working at Best Buy said they had a desktop at 25% off only because it had Win7. Looked at the tech specs, was good, just what I wanted and left happy, getting a discount to get what I wanted.

A few months later I needed a laptop (was travelling a lot). I deliberately went to the Lenovo and Dell business line sections to search since the machines for business users still have Win7 (ended up getting a ThinkPad).

Now, I paid the MS Win tax regardless both times. I wanted a Windows machine. But Win 8 so frustrated me that I went out of my way to avoid it, when it would've been simpler to just buy a machine with it. I was ready to spend more online to buy Win7 and overwrite the default installation.

I bought a new laptop last month that came with Windows 8. I wiped it and installed fresh from an OEM copy to get rid of the crapware, but basically I am happy with Windows 8. It boots fast and with Classic Start Menu installed is pretty similar to Windows 7. There are a few nice improvements like the way multiple input languages are handled and the new flat UI theme actually works quite well.

While not exactly intuitive I didn't find the Metro stuff or whatever it is now called to be particularly hard to us

You know that all you have to do is to click the lower left hand corner of the screen to bring up the desktop, right? It took you 20 minutes to figure that out?

Sure if that's all that was different. I wanted to see how different options were controlled (control panel issues), had weird things happen when moving around the mouse (hot corners etc) and other nuisances. Even after I got to the desktop, the easy list of everything in a start menu was missing.

Again, could've learned it, could've figured it out, there are workarounds, it's not rocket science. BUT WHY? Individually each thing is minor, but the cumulative effect is damned annoying. Why would a company unnecessarily aggravate so many of their users? If you wanted a single OS for tablets and other PCs, give each the interface best suited to it.

Microsoft will never learn no matter how much thier customer base screams and will alway assume they are doing things correctly and everyone else is wrong.
Yes, they need to settle in on windows 7 and give up for a bit becase they can't do it right. Wouldn't hurt to fire some guy by the name of Ballmar either.

I know that we Slashdotters would love to believe there is a Windows exodus because of Windows 8. But in reality, that will never happen. Are you saying that Grandma or Joe Blow, as pissed off as they are with the Win8 UI, are going to switch to Linux? Most "average" people might have heard the name but have no idea what it is. And forget about learning to use it. Mac OS have a better chance at getting people to jump ship. To most people "Windows" is synonymous with "Computer". They don't know there are other OS's out there. People will be pissed off and not buy more more Microsoft products. People will vote with their dollars, not their choice of OS.

Let Explorer run Metro apps (non-maximized, with chrome), and let Metro run Explorer apps (maximized, chromeless). Then let user choose the mode, default being based on form factor but overridable by user.

I hear Visual Studio is pretty good but I haven't touched since VS 2008. But what completely put me off from MS products was the relentless flogging of their other products. You would choose one product and they would try and shove their other products down your throat. Then there is the religious zealotry of MSDN shops. I have seen company after company where they have an MSDN certified IT head and that is it, Microsoft everything. Can't afford another SQL license then develop it in Access. And office is the worst; I sense within MS that they shove Office even down the throats of people there. If you develop something at MS it seems to be mandatory that somehow it will have some aspect that will exist to promote Office. XBox seems to be a huge exception to this rule and I suspect it was not due to lack of trying on the part of the Office mandarins.

But in the world of programming there are all kinds of tools that exist on their own. They have no agenda beyond being a good product. Python exists for people to make cool things. Boost exists to make C++ better. MySQL went a bit off the rails so MariaDB sprung into existence to serve up the data of zillions of people. Github exists for people to work on code together. This is where Visual Basic/Visual Studio were many eons ago. About the only product VB VS promoted was Windows which was fine at the time because the choices were DOS or Windows. But now we have many choices of Platform and OS. If MS doesn't want to become irrelevant they need to expand their horizons. Office needs to go on all the platforms. People will buy it. Visual Studio needs to allow development for all the platforms. People will love it.

But as it stands there is no product of MS that makes me go ooooh, got to get me some of that. Windows 8 just sounds more annoying than Windows 7. This whole PCs not booting anything but Windows sounds horrible.

I don't blame Windows 8. Windows 8 is just a clear sign that MS is so completely out of touch that they think that by taking the worst parts of iOS (locked up systems) that they can compete. I remember reading articles in early 2012 that about how MS was going to have 15% of the smart phone market. I saw the metro interface up close in product placements on TV and I said, BS. There is no reason for anyone to even try it. Then when the surface came out people even said that this would take a bite out of the iPad, Nope. These are examples of MS trying to buy reality. Buying reality is costly and doesn't change reality. So if they keep on this path of trying to bend everyone to their will instead of giving people compelling reasons to buy their products I just wonder if MS has one decade left, or less?

I fully understand the reason for switching to the full-screen Start screen. You want a cut of the app revenue like Apple gets, and that only makes sense. I would even be happy with Win8.1 if you could just boot to the desktop and not have the Start button back (but I would REALLY like it back as a bonus...) Here's one thing I can't live with that needs to change:

Put Aero Glass back into the OS as a selectable theme, or even Aero without the glass.

I'm our company's desktop systems architect, and I'm still on Windows 7 for all my personal machines. The main reason is the flat, ugly, hard-to-navigate 2D user interface on the desktop. I really want the client-side improvements Windows has made, I want Client Hyper-V so I don't have to shell out for VMWare Workstation. I definitely want Windows to Go. But I can't use the new flat user interface. Office 2013, Visual Studio and Server Manager are acres and acres of monochrome text and icons with very little to guide your eyes around the screen. I know a lot of people complained about Aero wasting processor cycles, but even the non-transparent version had buttons, text and icons that were colorful, stood out on the screen so you knew where they were instinctively, etc.

I guess I should have left the Customer Experience Improvement Program opt-in checkbox checked all these years...but I can't be the only one who feels this way. So if you want me to upgrade, I need the following:- Aero Glass available as a theme - you can even leave the 2D screen as the default.- Start button as a bonus -- If I don't get that I'll be OK, but I'd be happy if I did.

A modern smart phone has an ARM processor, which is nothing at all like the more powerful CPUs used in desktop PCs.

If most smart phones were x86 I think it'd already have happened, but the only two who can produce x86 chips don't want to kill the PC market.

If smart phones were built on x86 they would be the size of a football and you would need to carry the battery on your back. The complete System on a Chip used in a smart phone consumes around one or two watts, while the smallest embedded i3 CPU alone draws ten times that much. There's a very good reason for not using x86 processors in embedded devices and it isn't "Intel doesn't feel like mak

It's still an Atom processor, not a true x86. If you don't understand the difference you may want to do some serious reading before you make yourself look even more foolish.

Sweet little troll, x86 is an instruction set and Atoms are as true as they come. In fact it supports x86-64 as well, not the oldest Atoms but even this little smart phone is a full 64 bit processor. It's not very fast but if you think that's anything to do with it you're the foolish one.

The international version of the Galaxy 3S produces ~6400 BogoMIPS, about 20% more than a CoreDuo from 2006. Add in the fact that it has a pretty sweet GPU and the average users really can't tell the difference.

My ultra-portable laptop from 2002 had a single-core 750 MHz Pentium III-M processor, 128MB RAM and 20GB HDD so you're off by at least a couple years if you want it to be as apples-to-apples as the comparison goes. The latest Samsung Galaxy S4 that launches in 10 days has a 1.9 GHz quad-core Krait 300 (GT-I9505 version), 2 GB LPDDR3 RAM and 64 GB of flash - it'd run a million circles around my old laptop.

Microsoft cannot stop the exodus. And it is only going to speed up once smart phone docking stations become ubiquitous.

My smart phone has almost as much horsepower as my PC.

Unless your PC is extremely crappy, then it really doesn't.

There's no reason in the world why I should not be able to hook up my IBM Model M, a mouse, and a couple of large monitors to it for the purposes of media creation. Once this happens commonly, it's all over for Microsoft.

Sure. I bet you'll have no problem pumping out enough pixels for a 7680x1600 display (or even 2560x1600, with a single monitor) to play games on or create and render video content on. Why, I bet that's just around the corner.

Of course, then what desktops can do by that point will be far greater than they are now and the standard will have shifted.

Your $200 pocket phone can do a lot of things that it couldn't do a decade ago, but it will always trail behind what is possible with more dedicated hardware and is a very long time off from being able to do everything you need to a satisfactory degree such that you don't need any other form of computing. It can't even compete with a standalone digital camera, yet (unless your needs are very minimal -- just for snapping pictures of your drunk idiot friends at a frat party or something).

That said, I have no doubt that Microsoft would be willing to just dump the whole market and dedicate themselves to mobile, because -- by sheer numbers -- that's going to end up more profitable the same way it's more profitable to make a mediocre show that ten million people watch than an award-winning highly revered show that only four million people watch.

A $200 pocket phone can do a lot of things a full desktop PC couldn't do a decade ago.

A $200 pocket phone still cannot do a lot of things a full desktop PC could do a decade ago.

Most people have very minimal needs.

I would say "Most people's needs are minimal." The distinction is very important. Most people have some computing needs that cannot be met by touch-only input and a slow processor (i.e. smartphone and/or tablet).

There are even some people who have many computing needs that cannot be met by devices like that.

I think the percentage of people who can meet all of their computing needs with a smartphone and/or tablet,

>> A $200 pocket phone still cannot do a lot of things a full desktop PC could do a decade ago.> Only because the software isn't there. And fixing that is only a matter of time.... The CPU is really only a bottleneck

Can I have some of what you are smoking please?

1. Let me know when I can _compile_ on a smart phone. Last time I checked there is NO native compiler running on iOS -- you need a "real" computer (aka desktop) for that. Likewise for game development you're not going to use some shitty 1 GB mobile CPU when you have 16 GB or more plus an i7 for game development. Maybe you'll complain most people don't need "high end code editing". Fine. Let me know when I can edit my HTML / Javascript pages on a phone. Just because you _can_ do it, doesn't mean you _should_ do it. My next point addresses this:

2. Why the hell would I even try to develop on a phone at a crappy low res phone display 1000x600 when I have 2560x1440 27" monitor to write code on AND a 2nd 1920x1080 monitor to run my app on??

IF phones would let me extend their "screen" to a REAL monitor then Yes, you MIGHT have a point someday.

Mobile = great for consuming content,Desktop = great for creating content.

Will Mobile catch up to the Desktop? Yes, I agree the gap will significantly decrease but I seriously doubt it will even come close within 10 years. The number of people consuming content is always much > the number of people creating content.

That's fantastic, you can finally replace your 10-year-old Windows XP PC with a phone dock. Meanwhile, my PC has 8GB of RAM, a few hundred GB of SSD storage plus 2TB of HDD storage, and a GeForce GTX 580 (that comes with 512 cores, compared to your phone's 1-16; with room for a second GTX, if necessary). I'll leave out my CPU because I don't want your phone to recognize your voice and start crying. I'm not going to be replacing my PC with a phone any time soon.

I won't be replacing my PC with a phone any time soon either. But my mom could replace her PC with a phone or tablet today and lose nothing. Most people are more like my mom than they are like you or me.

Oh yeah search is a GREAT way to find that program I use every six months that lets me put some of my pictures together to create a collage for those posters I make twice a year. I think it was called "Blue Pixie"./s
Except that it was called "Green Pyxel" and started with an executable named "grnpxlUI.exe".

I don't know about the devs at MS, but I got used to it pretty quickly. My new laptop came with Win8 -- which I committed to using for 2 weeks before I spent money on a Win7 license. At first I hated the stock interface, but I got over it. The desktop is a desktop -- I can still load software off the task bar by pinning a link there. The only time I see metro is when I need to load something other than the core 4-6 tools I use (Firefox, Word, Excel, IE and Publisher)... so mostly when I want to run steam or wow.

For everything else, just hit start and start typing what you're looking for -- it pops up.

Now -- I don't think it's "better" than the start button (which did all of that without a full-screen interface that blocks my view of open docs, etc) but it's not all that bad.

The trade off is that the rest of the OS makes a bit more sense -- the interface is cleaner (less clutter around the window edge), file and print sharing is more stream-lined, etc. I have no idea what the charm bar is for, I think it should go away. But overall -- it's a standard windows experience - slightly annoying but it gets the job done. I have to go back and forth from Win7 (at work and on my desktop at home) and Win8 on my laptop -- not really enough of a difference to notice 9 times out of 10.

Some of the retarded lengths companies went to were bad, but nested folders, on the whole, are a VERY good thing. They allow me to organize everything into categories based on what I might want to do. I don't want to see every installed program thrown at me as soon as I open the start screen, and before you start telling me I can organize them the same way on the start screen: Yes, yes I can. Just in a less convenient, less efficient and tile-filled manner.

Manual categorization is essential if you are really working. The start menu only becomes unmanagable if you rely on installation utilities to set it up for you. The only way to be sure you can access what you need when you need it is to put it where you want it.

There really *was* an option to disable metro and ribbon UIs in the win8 release candidate.

Microsoft said "bend over and squeal with delight!" When they removed it from the final, and kept pounding away, ignoring the protests of their users, instead making grunting noisesof their own that users will "get used to it", and "you'll like it, I promise!"

There's a lesson here, and it isn't exactly Microsoft that needs to learn it, because the *exact same* bullshit has happened 2 other places in Gnome3 and Unity.

That lesson? If you are a UI "designer", DON'T FORCE YOUR "VISION" ON USERS. In business, the *customer* is always right, not your personal sense of aesthetic bliss.

Gnome's hamfisted refusal to accept that is why most of their userbase flew the coop. Unity on Ubuntu is why many users fled to Mint. And on win32, Metro is why users refuse to migrate to 8.

The lesson here applies all around. If people want tacky, they want tacky. If somebody orders a double cheeseburger, don't try to force them to eat caviar, while insisting it's classier. It isn't what they want, and they won't come back.

Caviar is nice as an option, but don't force the issue. Your* personal foibles about seeing tacky UIs only matter to YOU. Wear the shoe on the other foot, and imagine a world where only BBQ and cheeseburgers exist, and are what get enforced, preventing you from even trying caviar. That is what you do to people when you deny them the options they want. People don't need a reason to have a preference, and some prefer the tacky UI paradigms. Respect that preference, and keep your userbase.

*this is meant to sound confrontational, but does not apply to any specific person. If you are a UI designer, and try the BS cited, it applies to you. If you are not, naturally, it does not.

Agreed, Windows 8\2012 has some seriously good under the hood changes but I haven't been able to take advantage of them due to the training costs from Metro. Removing Metro from the equation will mean it's pretty much a certainty that we'll upgrade within a year of the next release instead of riding 7 until it's almost EOL.

If they don't do something to sort this out soon, Steve B will be remembered for only 2 things - throwing chairs while making threats and fucking the PC industry so hard it died. And Steve - if you by the slightest chance happen to read this, is this really *all* you want to be remembered for?